Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.